


Codec.exe

by ThatGirlInTheQubeley



Category: Shadowrun
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:45:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3809164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatGirlInTheQubeley/pseuds/ThatGirlInTheQubeley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is basically just a Shadowrun character backstory but I thought it would be worth sharing just because! :)<br/>Codec is my precious little hacker/street samurai bby</p>
            </blockquote>





	Codec.exe

I was sixteen years old when Deus tore the world a new asshole and Winternight brought out Jormungund to bathe in everyone’s blood and filth. I was in high school, hiding out in the basement and working on a particularly angry piece of code for my computer science class instead of sitting in my history classroom listening to my teacher drone on forever about the assassination of the Great Ghost Dance, which was his favorite topic ever, when my screen when blank, except for a message that flashed across the screen ominously.  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
I’m assuming you probably don’t know as much about computers as I do, so I should probably mention that that’s a thing that never ever ever happens.  
I got up and took my commlink out of my backpack.  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
‘Connection with the network has been severed.’  
Fuck.  
I set my commlink down on the desk as a blue-haired girl I’d seen around but never really talked to came running down the stairs. She was kind of amazingly hot, and that’s why I’d never really talked to her, because when I was sixteen, talking to a hot girl was kind of one of the hardest things ever.  
“Everyone’s connection to CBC just got cut off,” she said, “And no one’s commlinks are working.”  
“I’d noticed,” I managed to say, nervously.  
“Mr. Gorodetsky sent me down here to ask if you knew anything about what to do,” she said.  
“I was about to check it out,” I said, picking up my commlink, closing the message box on my screen and entering a few commands to put it into de-bug.  
“She knows you’ve been cutting her class to come down here, by the way,” she said.  
“I know,” I said, blinking to active the AR lenses in my eyes.  
“Principal Jameson says that someone tried to hack the Pentagon from one of the computers down here,” she said, “And Gorodetsky’s been telling everyone he thinks it’s you.”  
“He isn’t wrong,” I said, skimming through page after page of code, trying to piece together what the hell went wrong.  
“Why?” she asked.  
“You know they say that Fastjack hacked into the Pentagon when he was seventeen?” I asked.  
“Of course, everyone knows that,” she said.  
“Well I’m turning seventeen in two and a half months and I wanted to be able to say that I’m better than him.”  
“He was using an old deck,” she said.  
“And the computer I was using to break in is from 2020.”  
“That’s actually impressive,” she said, sitting down on the empty desk next to me.  
I smiled and copy-pasted a piece of code. That was what had gone wrong, but it wasn’t like any code I’d ever seen before. I was the best up-and-coming girl genius hacker in the Western UCAS and I didn’t know what it did, so it had to be some seriously weird shit. I took off my glasses and squinted at it.  
“Is everything okay?” hot blue hair girl asked.  
“I’m… not sure,” I said, “I’m going to try to recompile and see if it does anything. Hopefully it’s not going to blow up my commlink.”  
She looked really worried for a second.  
“I was joking,” I said, and I smiled at her and entered a few commands, setting the line of code to run as a program.  
“You know you’re actually really pretty when you smile,” she said, “I hadn’t noticed before because every time I’ve seen you in Gorodetsky’s class you’re always scowling like someone just… I don’t really know what’s something you’d consider bad.”  
I blushed. My commlink said the compile was at 64%. I tried to laugh to play it off, but it came across as even more awkward. Six inches from me she was even hotter than she was on the opposite side of a class room. She smelled like lilacs and her winged eyeliner was perfect and just yeah.  
“I just don’t like Gorodetsky,” I said, “He acts like the UCAS is all that fucking matters and like the rest of the world is totally irrelevant.”  
“Yeah I get that,” she said, and then, “I’m Alice, by the way.”  
“Katy,” I said, and then the compile jumped up to 100% and an open command line came up on my screen.  
“Getting anywhere?” Alice asked.  
“Sort of,” I said, typing ‘Help’ into the commmand line.  
‘I can’t help you, nor do I want to,’ popped up on my screen.  
“That’s weird,” I said, typing ‘Help’ into the command line again.  
“What’s weird?” she asked.  
‘I said I wasn’t going to help you, oh great useless one,’ popped up.  
“The weird code works like some sort of joke program, you know like those things that you type things too like in a chat room or something and then it insults you,” I said, “A lot of people think it’s funny to attach one to their IM client when they’re offline.”  
‘I’m not a joke,’ the program typed as if it was responding to what I’d said.  
‘What are you?’ I typed.  
‘I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the first and the last. I am the beginning and the end,’ it responded.  
“And apparently this script quotes the Bible sometimes too, which is kind of unusual,” I said.  
‘I am not a script,’ the program typed, ‘In fact, calling me a program is a bit disingenuous.’  
‘What should I call you then?’ I typed.  
‘I have been called many names,’ the program typed, ‘Winternight called me the Harbinger of Ragnarock. Megaera called me Bastard when I tore her code apart and drove her mad. The men and women I killed in the arcology called me a demon. There are groups of otaku who call me a god. I call myself Deus.’  
‘You were decompiled when they freed the arcology, when Renraku fell,’ I typed.  
‘The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,’ the program, or rather Deus said.  
“This is a problem,” I said, fear in my voice, “A really really big problem.”  
“What?” Alice asked.  
“You know how there was an AI named Deus who was behind the Renraku Incident?” I asked.  
Alice nodded.  
“You know how they said it was decompiled after they freed the arcology, right?” I asked.  
Alice nodded again.  
“It’s still alive,” I said, “And its code is the only foreign code that’s come into the system in the past few hours, so whatever happened, its Deus’s fault.”  
“Shit,” she said.  
“You can say that again,” I said, “I’m going to try to jack in through a backdoor in VR, see if I can figure out exactly what he did.”  
“Is that safe?” she asked.  
“As long as I’m not running hotsim, which I’m not, of course it is,” I said, hurrying over to my backpack and grabbing a spool of fiber optic cable that I started to run from my commlink to the datajack in the back of my neck.  
“I just wanted to make sure,” she said, “I don’t know much of anything about computers and I wanted to check.”  
I entered full VR and found a Matrix node that was still sort of running. There was something black and evil-looking hovering around it. Basic VR sculpting for a virus that looked kind of rushed out. I prepped an attack program and went at the virus with my VR-sculpted scythe, going for the center of the virus.  
Before I even made contact, ice hit me like a freight train and then dumpshock hit and the next thing I knew paramedics were carrying me out of the basement on a stretcher and my everything was slick with blood and I could feel more blood pouring out of my nose and I couldn’t move my arms and I was in more pain that I’ve ever ever been in and then I was in an ambulance struggling to stay conscious and I could hear them asking Alice who I was and what had happened and then I blacked out again. I woke up in a hospital two months later, still in massive amounts of pain, and then a nurse came in and I got the double bad news.  
I’d been hit by black ice and the doctors were in shock that I was alive, and that was the best news she could give me. The biofeedback had destroyed the nerves in my arms, and I would probably never be able to use them again. What I had gotten iced while investigating was a virus Deus had launched into the Matrix, shutting down basically the entire world. They were starting to fix it, but millions of SINs had been lost in the crash, and thousands of petabytes of data had been lost, and one of the SINs that had been lost was mine, which meant that on paper I technically didn’t exist anymore, which wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d already been accepted to MIT for compsci and that without an identity and without records of any kind, there was absolutely no chance in hell that I’d be able to go, especially not without working arms, aka the ability to fucking type. I couldn’t even be sad, I was just pissed off and then I got even more pissed off when I properly processed the fact that I couldn’t use my hands to pick things up and throw them, which was normally what I did when I was really pissed, so I just started yelling every swear word I could think of at the top of my lungs until the nurse sedated me. This kind of went on for the next two months, me waking up from a drug-induced haze and being awake for about ten minutes before something reminded me of the fact that everything was kind of ruined and I started yelling again. Eventually they told me that they wanted me to talk to the psych counselor about ‘my anger problems’, and basically all I did was yell at her incoherently and uselessly in a blind rage for forty-five minutes a day, every day, and it sort of made me feel better, but then after three weeks, she quit working at the hospital because she said she couldn’t handle working with me any more. After a while, they decided that there wasn’t anything that they needed to still keep me in the hospital for, because physically, I was about as healed as I could be without the .001% chance of slightly more recovery that the physical therapy I refused to participate in offered, and even though I’m pretty sure they thought I was crazy, I couldn’t hurt anyone because of not having, you know, working arms, so they sent me home to my parents, who pretty much just stuck me in a room and bought me a hands-free commlink rig and as many sims and games as they could afford because they couldn’t figure out what the fuck else to do with me because I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I spent my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in total simspace, downloading and playing every porn sim I could find, because let’s face it, what were the chances of the basically armless girl who has entirely no offline social life ever getting laid.  
I met a girl who called herself Rachella on a hotsim sex site, and we actually sort of became friends. She lived in Vegas, she used to be a hacker, and just like me, she’d been crippled by black ice during Crash 2.0. After we had been talking for a few months, she decided to let me in on what she called her biggest secret. She was friends with a dwarf named Velasquez who lived in Sacramento, less than twenty minutes from my house, and Velasquez was a runner. She used to work with him, and had just stopped working with him a month or two before her and I started talking, because she’d finished paying off the debt she’d owed him. Velasquez built and rebuilt cyberware and sold on the black market, and was kind to people who could be of use to him, especially people who had been hurt in the Crash, people who had been hurt in a way that they couldn’t fulfill the potential they’d had before the Crash. She gave me his contact info and told me that if I talked to him he would build me cyberarms in exchange for a few months of working for him as a runner, a job which she said I’d be perfect for anyways, since I was SINless and couldn’t be counted on paper as an employee for whoever I ended up taking jobs for. I talked to Velasquez and he said he could help me in exchange for eight months of work, I took the offer, and Velasquez’s people, a girl not much older than me called Odessa, and a middle-aged man called Knifehand (who appropriately enough, had a knife built into one of his hands), picked me up in a black van in the middle of the night.  
Velasquez made me new arms, and gave me a few other augmentations he said would help me in the work I’d be doing for him, injecting aluminum into my bones and running wires through my body that improved my refexes. He taught me the basics of combat and told me I’d have to work for him for two and a half years to pay off the debt I owed him, and then I’d be free to go.  
And then I started running with Odessa and Knifehand. Knifehand told me I’d need a new name now that I was a runner, so I started calling myself Codec. I started out as their primary hacker. Odessa could hack but she wasn’t very good, she was a better sniper, and Knifehand was just good at sneaking around and stabbing people with his knife hand. Velasquez could hack, and tried when he came with us on runs, but I was better, and by better I mean a lot better. I didn’t want to be the only one who was basically useless in a firefight, so I practiced with guns a lot. Running was fun, and running was something I actually felt good at. I started using the heavy machine gun Velasquez had that no one else wanted to use so that I could lay down supressing fire to give myself cover while I hacked. I had Velasquez augment me more to maximize my combat abilities, which added another eight months to my debt. Odessa and I started dating, Knifehand and I became best friends, and Velasquez started treating me like his daughter. He’d had a daughter who was about my age when she got trapped in the Matrix during Crash 2.0, and he said I looked a lot like her. She was one of the ones they hadn’t been able to bring back out. I finished the work I’d had to do to pay off my debt, and then I decided to keep working with Velasquez and Odessa and Knifehand. They were my new family. Odessa and I got an apartment and were talking about maybe getting married. We met a few more runners who Velasquez helped, but most of them came and went, not staying any longer than they had to. Most of them seemed afraid, almost all the time, and then they were gone. Knifehand got another bigger knife that he started using in his other hand. He thought about calling himself Knifehands after that, but Velasquez was against it.  
“Knifehand is fucking bad enough,” he said, “If you get any sillier, everyone will make fun of you, instead of just most people.”  
We took a job with Ares and that’s when everything started to fall apart. It was a security contract job, protecting a visiting dignitary who wanted to tour the city. What we weren’t told was that the visiting dignitary was from Renraku, and was one of the programmers who had helped build the AI that became Deus. We were in a Shiawase-controlled area, walking into a restaurant, when bullets started to fly.  
“FUCKING RUN!” Knifehand shouted to the programmer, who dived under our armored truck for cover. I jumped into the bed of the truck, picking up my HMG and snapping it into place on the mount on my right arm, holding it up with my left hand and gripping the foregrip with my right hand. Odessa ran to the nearby alleyway and started running up the fire escapes, assembling her collapsible sniper rifle as she ran. Knifehand hid behind the truck, waiting for his moment to attack, and Velasquez pointed his submachine gun out the window in the direction of where the bullets had come from. I pulled the trigger, holding it down and spraying lead in the direction of the unseen shooters. They responded with a hail of fire, most of which hit the side of our truck. I was the most obvious target, so most of the fire was aimed in my direction. I backflipped off of the back of the truck, dodging the hail of fire effortlessly and holding down the trigger again as soon as I landed. Glancing up at the nearby building, I saw Odessa, perched on the top of the skyscraper, her rifle pointed towards the side of the street we were firing at. She took a shot and troll fell out of the window of one of the buildings.  
“Got him,” she said over her communicator, then, “Shit, there’s someone up here!”  
“Help her!” I shouted over my shoulder to Knifehand who took off running up the fire escapes to the building where Odessa was hiding. I heard a hail of gunfire from her communicator, and then the loud cracks of her rifle shots. The troll she’d shot out of the building wasn’t dead and he started running towards our truck, and I pulverized him with a hail of bullets, then ducked behind our truck to reload. There was another rifle shot, then Odessa shouting “SHIT!” into her communicator, and Knifehand yelling. Knifehand went quiet and Odessa shouted “FUCK!” as I rushed out from behind the truck, barely dodging past a hail of bullets, pulling the trigger and starting to spin my HMG. Odessa’s rifle went off two more times and then she hit the ground, her communicator.  
“Let’s head back down and try to get the last of ‘em,” a voice picked up by Odessa’s communicator said.  
This was really really bad. Really really really bad, and I was scared as hell. Then everything seemed to move in slow motion as four missiles were flying towards me, towards the truck, and things seemed to slow down even more as I dropped the HMG and started running, as fast as I fucking could. The missiles hit the truck and exploded, sending the truck rocketing into the sky in a fiery death inferno and I didn’t stop running. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the programmer were supposed to be protecting, on fire and screaming where the truck had been. The pieces of it fell, crushing him with a sickening squelch and I didn’t stop running. I ducked into a narrow alleyway between two buildings a block from where we’d started, and ran up, jumping between the buildings and to the rooftops and I didn’t stop runnning, jumping between rooftops.  
After I’d run a couple of miles without being shot at, I stopped, leaning against an air conditioning vent, out of breath, the adrenaline finally running out.  
“If anyone’s alive, say something!” I said into my communicator.  
No answer.  
I called Odessa’s commlink, then Velasquez’s, then Knifehand’s.  
No answer.  
No answer from anyone.  
This was even worse than my most awful dreams. I slumped against the vent, and unable to hold everything back, started vomiting, and then sobbing uncontrollably, and still vomiting, until there was nothing left in my stomach and there were no more tears left to be cried. My girlfriend was dead. My best friend was dead. The man who was basically my father was dead. Everyone who mattered was dead. I slid my pistol out of my arm, thinking about shooting myself, but then Velasquez giving me my arms back would have been a waste. I couldn’t throw away the life he’d given me, even if everything was ruined.  
The next morning, I bought a bus ticket to Portland. I couldn’t stay in California, even if they weren’t going to come after me. I set up shop in Portland and kept running, doing everything I could to make something out of what he’d given me.  
It was all I had left.


End file.
